Letter from Freud to Fliess, July 7, 1897

Vienna, July 7, 1897

Dear Wilhelm,

I know that at the moment I am useless as a correspondent, with no right to any claims, but it was not always so and it will not remain

so. I still do not know what has been happening in me. Something from the deepest depths of my own neurosis set itself against any advance in the understanding of the neuroses, and you have somehow been involved in it. For my writing paralysis seems to me designed to inhibit our communication. I have no guarantees of this, just feelings of a highly obscure nature. Has nothing of the kind happened to you? For the past few days it has seemed to me that an emergence from this obscurity is in preparation. I notice that in the meantime I have made all kinds of advances in my work, and every now and then an idea once more has occurred to me. The hot weather and overwork no doubt have had their share in this.

I see then that the defense against memories does not prevent their giving rise to higher psychic structures, which persist for a while and then are themselves subjected to defense. This, however, is a most highly specific kind — precisely as in dreams, which contain in nuce [in a nutshell] the psychology of the neuroses in general. What we are faced with are falsifications of memory and fantasies — the latter relating to the past or future. I know roughly the rules in accordance with which these structures are put together and the reasons why they are stronger than genuine memories, and I have thus learned new things about the characteristics of the processes in the Ucs. Alongside these, perverse impulses arise; and when, as later becomes necessary, these fantasies and impulses are repressed, the higher determinations of the symptoms already following from the memories make their appearance, as well as new motives for adhering to the illness. I am learning to recognize a few typical cases of how these fantasies and impulses are put together and a few typical determinants for the initiation of repress